


Borderlands

by dynamicsymmetry



Category: City & the City - China Mieville
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-17
Updated: 2012-12-17
Packaged: 2017-11-21 08:23:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/595582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We are, each of us, a city. To reach each other we must cross our own borders.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Borderlands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Miri Cleo (miri_cleo)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/miri_cleo/gifts).



They met for the first time outside his door, on front steps slick with rain, and it made a kind of sense that in that moment they would both occupy the same place and time when he was not there at all. Later they would both wonder what had drawn them there when they both already knew that he would not be; what they had hoped to accomplish, to recapture, to retain. Neither of them had ever particularly loved him. It had been so much simpler that way.

Being someone’s lover is in itself a process of _unseeing_. You learn where to look and where not to. You learn which transgressions will result in your exile. Though of course Tyador Borlu was always an exceptionally easygoing man about such things, and it had never worried either of them.

They had never been instructed to unsee each other. They did not do so now.

“You’ve had a letter?” Sariska murmured. Biszaya nodded. There was total unsurprise. No questions were necessary for either to understand, not in that moment, but there is a certain politeness in questions.

“He isn’t here.” Observation, not information. Again, a nod. The mist that had been lingering for the last hour intensified to a light drizzle. Rain respected no borders, touched each city in like fashion, and now it touched each woman in the same way. Sariska’s hair was dark and lightly curled and the rain began to weigh the curls out of existence. Biszaya had an umbrella.

“Do you want some coffee?” Biszaya asked. Again, Sariska nodded. They turned away from the door behind which Tyador was not and now never would be and made their way together back down the street, vividly aware of each other and pleasantly unsure of whether this was, in itself, a form of breach.

~

The café was in a crosshatch in a slightly upscale neighborhood that harmonized pleasantly with a vaguely more upscale neighborhood of Ul Qoma—though of course one could not see this. It was crowded and smelled of wet boots and coffee grounds, and the window by which the two of them sat was slightly fogged. Sariska ordered biscuits and a pot of tea for them to share. The drink was dark and bitter, as if in a kind of Besź defiance against the sweet, creamy Ul Qoman stuff that passed for tea. Sariska held her steaming cup in her hands and stared out the window. Biszaya watched her.

“He didn’t say, is the thing,” Sariska said. Her voice was low and carefully conversational. “He didn’t tell you either.”

It wasn’t a question but Biszaya murmured an affirmative.

“It isn’t that I miss him.” Sariska turned her gaze back on Biszaya. The humidity made the steam thicker and one of her eyes was briefly obscured. Both of the women had dark eyes that might have been any color, depending on the light. This fact was not lost on either of them. “I’m not sure what it is. Do you know?”

“I know.” Biszaya picked up a biscuit—finger-length and vaguely finger-shaped and flaky with sugar—and contemplated it as if she wasn’t sure she actually wanted it. “It’s like… you get glimpses. Of something else. You know it’s not strange, you know it’s a feature of the landscape… But then someone you know slips into it and it’s harder to miss for a while. I wasn’t looking for him today,” she added. “Not him. Something else.”

Not Breach. One did not look for Breach.

The look that passed between them conveyed something for which neither of them had a name. They sipped their tea and finished the biscuits in silence. Neither’s thoughts were a mystery to the other. The window fogged up completely so that all that could be seen through were the lights of passing cars, and through that near-opacity it was impossible to tell what city they were in, whether they should be seen at all.

~

Sariska did not offer to walk Biszaya home, nor did Biszaya make the same offer, but nevertheless they found themselves walking together toward LimburgStrász, toward brighter lights and boutiques into which they did not intend to go. LimburgStrász sat in a patch of Besź totality and was an attempt to harken back to what Besź proprietors imagined as Eastern European metropolitan charm. The signs all had clever little names, plays on what the shops themselves offered for sale. Fairylights were strung from lamppost to lamppost.

One boutique displayed handmade pottery in its window and Sariska stopped in front of this, her face thoughtful. Biszaya stopped with her, waiting for whatever it was she might say.

“I have a vase from this place,” Sariska said presently. “I don’t remember if he bought it for me or not. I think he might have. But the memories… fade, don’t they? The instant he was gone. It’s like part of my brain that I don’t even control knows what happened.”

Not that Sariska had any particular way of knowing for sure, but there is knowing and there is knowing, and this was part of a long process of goodbye. Not the unseeing of memory, but the total loss of it, when it was elected to be not worth retaining.

Biszaya reached out, on an impulse that also bore no close scrutiny, and took gentle hold of Sariska’s shoulders, turning her away from the shop’s window and placing them face to face. There was no bitterness here, they both understood that, and very little regret, but there was a sense of something new emerging from the remains. Biszaya raised a hand and touched her fingertips to the underside of Sariska’s chin. Sariska closed her eyes.

“Show it to me. The vase.”

~

Sariska lived in a flat several blocks from Copula Hall, neat and cozy without being cramped and full of shelves filled in their turn with large, glossy art books, both photography and paintings, sculpture; she did not seem to discriminate. The lights were off, the primary illumination the streetlights outside. These were dull and yellowish and when Sariska turned by the window they cast the angular lines of her face into sharper angles. Biszaya was still very close.

“Here.” Sariska lifted something off a table by the window and held it up. It occurred to Biszaya to wonder why she hadn’t turned on the lights, and then it occurred to her that maybe it didn’t matter. The point was not the sight of the vase, as she took it carefully. The point was the weight, the heft of it and the shape, as if it were a missile, as if she might throw it. Or it was an anchor-point, a fragment of departed past. But like everything else with Tyador, adrift. Without a reference. It sat in her hands and she could connect it to nothing—except Sariska’s cool, smooth hands when she gave it back.

And her fingers lingered against the gentle knobs of Sariska’s knuckles.

“The world is a different shape than we thought,” Sariska murmured. “After the riots… I don’t know, I knew something had changed, even before I got the letter. And everything was so normal before… it was routine. Now it feels like nothing is the way it was. And I don’t know what’s really different.”

_And I am in a city that I can’t see—a third city. Not some kind of legendary thing, not the product of kooks and conspiracy theorists. Something new-born._

Biszaya thought it and didn’t say. She touched the vase again. “This is Ul Qoman.”

“He bought it in an import shop.” Sariska smiled faintly. “You see, I love art? From all over but when it’s Ul Qoman it always feels a little bit dangerous. It feels a little like breach without breaching.”

_Breach without breaching._ This was taboo; there was something slightly shocking about hearing it spoken aloud. This thing—almost a fetish—that everyone knew some Besź possessed but never made explicit reference to. Wasn’t all transgression erotic, somehow? Standing there in the dark, Biszaya felt her skin begin to hum and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the past.

_Breach._

“You can stand,” Biszaya said softly. “Very still, and just for a second you can see… Kids do it, no one ever knows. But you know.”

Sariska shook her head. “I never…” Her dark curls covered her face, snagged in something damp at the corner of her mouth, and on another one of those impulses Biszaya reached up and tugged it free. And kept her hand there, curling the strand around her finger, tugging gently.

Transgressions of boundaries were destructive, she knew that, had studied the rise and fall of the networks that kept cities moving forward and not sliding back, the slippage across borders, the lost numbers. Collapse. Out of that something new always grew.

“No, we always,” Biszaya murmured, and tugged, leaned their mouths together, and when Sariska reached up and slid her fingers into Biszaya’s short hair she knocked the corner of her wrist into the vase and it fell.

It shattered. Neither of them noticed.

Some collapses are never seen. Some breaches are unintentional. Some thrusts forward across boundaries cannot be helped.

**Author's Note:**

> So this was honestly a little bit of a stretch for me, just because I love this book enough that I'm afraid of not doing it justice. And I honestly still don't think I have - the world is so strange and so lovely, yet so hard to move within - but I hope that it's at least not disappointing. Thanks for the opportunity to write it. Happy Holidays. <3


End file.
